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Marissa Mayer Can Curl*, And Six Other Things You Didn't Know About Yahoo's CEO

Although few people outside the company knew it at the time, thirteen months ago YahooYahoo‘s fate was balanced on a knife edge. While it was being widely reported that the board was treating its CEO search as a chance to reevaluate Yahoo’s strategic mission, what wasn’t general knowledge was how stark the choice was thanks to the blueprint drawn up by incumbent Ross Levinsohn, who had the job in an interim capacity.

He wanted it to stop competing with technology businesses like GoogleGoogle and MicrosoftMicrosoft and focus entirely on competing with media and content businesses like Disney, Time WarnerTime Warner, and News Corporation. As part of this transition, Levinsohn wanted to spin off, sell, or shut down several Yahoo business units. He said doing so would reduce Yahoo’s head count by as many as 10,000 employees, and increase its earnings before taxes and interest by as much as 50 percent.

In fact, Levinsohn announced during his presentation that he and his team had already started down this road.

Levinsohn told the board that, under his direction, [dealmaker Jim] Heckman had begun negotiating a deal with Microsoft to exchange Yahoo’s search business for Microsoft’s portal, MSN.com, and large payments in cash. Levinsohn and Heckman had also been talking with Google executive Henrique De Castro about turning over some of Yahoo’s advertising inventory. There was also talk of unloading some of Yahoo’s enterprise-facing advertising-technology businesses into a joint venture involving New York-based ad tech startup AppNexus.

Based on the questions the directors had for him, Levinsohn came away with the impression they were mostly interested in making sure nothing he had set in motion couldn’t be undone by anyone else who happened to become CEO. His gut was right: Four days later, Mayer was named to the post.

That’s one of the interesting tidbits from CarlsonCarlson‘s mega-article. Here are a few others:

-Why was Mayer seemingly sidelined in her last couple years at Google? Carlson considers but ultimately rejects one popular theory, that it was because she had dated co-founder Larry Page. Instead, drawing from dozens of interviews, he puts it down to three failings as an executive she displayed: a lack of interest in the revenue-generating side of the business, a refusal to delegate decisions and a personal style that struck some, including important rivals, as harsh and pedagogical. “Marissa has a tough user-interface,” is how one anonymous source puts it, amusingly.

-She wasn’t the only Googler on the search committee’s wish list. Chief business officer Nikesh Arora was also on it, as was Apple’s Eddy Cue and Hulu CEO Jason Kilar. After Kilar was named in the press as a candidate and pulled out, the board started employing radical secrecy measures to keep its discussions from leaking.

-Voting against Mayer’s appointment was a pretty good way to lose your seat on the board of directors. The three directors Carlson names as most strongly opposed to hiring her — chairman Fred Amoroso, Brad Smith and David Kenny — are all gone. Of course, so is Dan Loeb, who more or less personally got her hired.

-That occasionally harsh personal style? Levinsohn got a taste of it during his brief time working under Mayer. To win over his supporters on the board, the idea was put forth that he be offered a lucrative job as COO. And Levinsohn didn’t reject it out of hand — until he tried showing up for a scheduled meeting with her.

After he’d learned that she was getting the job, he’d flown back home to Los Angeles. When Mayer said she wanted to meet, he agreed to fly back up to Sunnyvale. But when he showed up at their appointed time, Mayer’s assistant told Levinsohn she was running late.

Levinsohn said to the assistant, “My office is three doors down. I’ll be in there.”

Suddenly anxious, the assistant said: “You have to wait here.”

She wanted him to wait so that when Mayer was done with whatever she was doing, he would be immediately available.

Levinsohn said, “Not so much.” He walked away.

In fairness to Mayer, the slight turned out not to have been personal. Carlson says blowing off meetings or showing up extremely late was a tic Mayer brought with her from Google, one that caused numerous Yahoos to assume, wrongly, that they were on the outs with her.

-That tendency to micromanage? It also applied to Yahoo’s relations with the press. Reports Carlson:

Throughout the fall, every week, all the Yahoo PR people had to complete a big spreadsheet with the names of every reporter they wanted to talk to and what the business objective was. This spreadsheet was then submitted to the head of Yahoo PR, Anne Espiritu. Espiritu would then submit the form to Mayer. Mayer, in turn, would approve or reject every call or email and then pass the form back down the line.

-She can curl. Growing up in Wisconsin, the oft-derided ice sport was among her extracurricular activities, along with volleyball, skiing, swimming, basketball, debating, ballet and something called “precision dance.” *Update: Actually, the curling part isn’t accurate, Mayer says. Carlson acknowledged that was secondhand information from a classmate of Mayer’s who may have misremembered; he’s corrected that information in his story.

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